Sunday Night Ritual at The Oz

DATE: Sunday, November 13, 2005
PLACE: The Oz - Sauget, Ill.
POISONS OF CHOICE: Plastic Bud bottles, Miller Lite draft
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Alison, Jordan, Jill


I'm at the front of the line to order a beer when a guy in a white dress shirt and forest green Dockers cuts in front of me.

"Can I get two VIP passes?" he asks the bartender, a plain-looking but attractive brunette in her mid-twenties. "Some girls just got severely groped on the dance floor."

"What's 'severely'? Like, was there penetration?" I ask him while the bartender is reaching into the far-right compartment of her cash drawer for the free passes. He never answers. He never even looks in my direction.

It's 1:41 in the morning - we took our sweet time getting out here, and I've been drinking for free the past few hours. The gratis booze has loosened my tongue a bit.

Bartender hands Forest Green Dockers a pair of VIP passes and he disappears back into the crowd without so much as a thank you.

"Sorry I ignored you there for a second," the bartender tells me. "What're you having?"

"One of those $4.50 plastic Bud bottles." She reaches into the cooler in front of me. "Can I also get a couple VIP passes? My Aunt Shirley just got gang-raped during 'Caught Up' by Usher."

She looks at me quizzically for a second, then realizes I'm full of shit.

"Just following the Dockers guy's lead," I tell her. "Seems like a good trick to get a free pass. But I bet he works here."

"The white one? Yeah, he's one of the managers." And she's off to help the next person.

I crack the cap on my plastic beer and look around. The bartender's right - there aren't a lot of white faces in the crowd tonight. It's 85 percent black, and almost all of the guys are dressed nicer than I am. They take this shit seriously. As for the ladies, well, hooch-wear seems to be the prevailing fashion.

--

The Oz is in East St. Louis, grouped in the microscopic town of Sauget, Illinois, with a 24/7 bar named Pop's and a pair of strip clubs. The warehouse-looking dance club is best known for what they call the Sunday Night Ritual, in which a DJ spins techno and hip-hop until five a.m. and partiers 19 and up can get in.

Sunday is the only night of the week underagers can gain entry, and it's the only night of the week I've ever been to The Oz. When you're a minion of the service industry, you're always going to have a handful of friends under the age of 21. And they're all going to have nineteenth and twentieth birthdays.

We're celebrating the former tonight - fellow restaurant server Jill just turned 19 - on the Oz's outdoor patio. The inside of the club is packed with bodies and body heat, but the covered outside is a comfortable 62 degrees or so, and the DJ is on a reggae-rap kick that sounds less annoying and one-note than you'd think.

Jill and Alison, a friend who also works with us, are booty-dancing on each other while Jordan - an ex-fellow employee and member of my Monday night bowling team - and I flank them on each end in bodyguard posture.

Neither girl professes to want to pick up anybody, despite the fact that they're dancing like they're currently engaged in clothed intercourse. And neither of us guys wants to dance, so we're left to deflect the seemingly endless parade of single guys in search of quick, anonymous ass. Jill and Alison each were already propositioned just walking through the club, up to the bar and out to the patio.

And, fuck, Alison is Jordan's girlfriend, so you can be sure he's taking the bodyguard stance seriously. Me, I'm standing back with a Black and Mild Mild, enjoying the scenery. The Oz is a prime people-watching venue, particularly when the hip-hop and techno cultures collide.

The patio is the spot for ravers on ecstacy to lose touch with reality and dance their asses off. Which basically means writhing around with a glow stick or Indiglo-powered cell phone in each hand while watching the colored tracers dance through their fields of vision.

But the balance of the clientele has shifted tonight, and now there are dozens of mostly bored-looking black folks standing around - a couple of them dancing - to the DJ's reggae-rap stylings while a lone holdout raver in the far corner swings a sad-looking glow stick. Also, someone's smoking weed out here. I want to find out who and make a new friend.

--

We get split up before too long. Alison and Jill want to hit the dance floor, Jordan goes with them to keep an eye on his girls, and I return to the bar for a two-dollar Miller Lite draft. Fuck the $4.50 plastic Buds.

And I take a lap around the building, eyeballing the handful of whore-dressed hotties and spotting a trio of enormous ladies - packed into their dresses like stuffed sausages - at the exit to the patio, fanning themselves with segments of cardboard boxes. All three are sweating profusely.

One trend at the Oz, all the obese people and various other eyesore misfits usually end up in the corners of the facility, near the exits, on nearly anonymous display but with an aching in their eyes that gives away that they hope they get noticed.

Whoever designed this building left us with very few throughways. There's one main outer and one inner walkway spanning the club's entire length and four narrow entrances to the dance floor. Traffic jams are frequent on a busy night, as are the unseen but exasperated-sounding DJ's mid-song crowd-control attempts.

"Once again, if you are on a walkway, do not stand still! Keep moving!" he says during the middle of 50 Cent's "Window Shopper." "Those of you crowded in front of the dance platform - that IS a walkway! If you are standing on the steps leading down to the dance floor, please go one direction or another! You ARE blocking traffic!"

I see what he means when I try walking past the dance platform, where a half-dozen guys' mouths are agape watching barely clothed patrons on full, sensual display mere feet in front of them. I take advantage of the slow-moving foot flow to gawk at the beauties myself. I have the same logic as when I wait in heavy traffic because there's a bad accident on the side of the road - it took me forever to get here because of this shit, so I might as well slow down and get a double eyeful.

I'm on the far end of the platform when the DJ switches to a techno song. The dance floor exodus is unbelievable. Dozens of African-Americans push past me to head to the bathroom or get a drink, and the people who remain on the floor simply stop moving and begin to talk amongst themselves. Even the platform girls climb down and mill around.

"Bored?" I ask one statuesque Nubian princess in a painted-on black dress.

"Shit yeah! I can't dance to this."

"That's Rule Number One of DJ'ing - you've got to read the crowd. If they're into something, you don't switch it on them." I look up at the tinted-window DJ booth, and mock-yell, "Are ya listening to me?!"

Down in the middle of the dance floor, the lone raver with the sad-looking glow stick is dancing like it's his last night on earth.

"That white boy's happier than a pig in shit!" notes the Nubian princess. I laugh and head back to the bar.

--

The platform dancer is the only stranger who seems willing to talk to me at The Oz. One thing about me when I go out - I view a crowd of strangers as a kind of social playground, and I set out to have exchanges, however brief, with as many people from as many backgrounds as I can.

But this is a hostile crowd, as far as I'm concerned. Everyone's here to get laid, and most of these people will either go home disappointed or settle for one of the summer-sausage self-fanners in the corner. So every conversational exchange from one stranger to another is assumed to be a pickup attempt. I could give two shits about going home with one of these girls - I'm not generally the anonymous sex sort, and I'm planning on going to bed and waking up alone. I just want to crack people up and have them crack me up, and no one's going for it.

I get a downright God-you're-pathetic sneer from a white girl at the bar while I'm waiting for my next Miller Lite. The more I hear the DJ issue these noxious-sounding crowd control warnings, the more I develop a bullshit comedy routine along the lines of, "If you're standing in the men's room, talking to your buddy at the urinals, holding your drink in your hand, shooting the breeze, and someone comes up behind you with a full bladder and his penis out, move out of the way! Other people need to urinate too!"

I give the white girl a couple examples of bullshit DJ announcements ("I know you're tired, but do NOT lie down on the bar and take a nap! Other people want drinks, and you are blocking them!"), and she practically throws up the loser "L" on her forehead before walking away in a huff.

When it comes time for me to break the seal and head for the urinals myself, I spot Jordan and tell him I'm headed over to Pop's and will be back in like ten minutes. I need a little fresh air, and a little less sardine-packed humanity.

On my way out the exit doors, I have two ladies literally tossed at me by a half-dozen burly bouncers. One of them is holding up her ripped red dress with her right hand, and the other is readjusting her weave. I pause to gawk, and one of the bouncers shoves me. ("Get the fuck out of the doorway!") And when all three of us are out in the cold, he pulls the door shut behind us.

"What the hell happened?" I ask the ripped-dress girl.

"Bitch was tripping, so I yanked her earrings out her ears! I got her good!"

"She ain't know what hit her!" says the weave-readjuster.

They slap each other a high-five, and Ripped Dress says, "Let's get the fuck home."

I walk toward Pop's, down the entrance-line barricades. We waited ten minutes to get in - the process of showing ID, being patted down, walking through a metal detector and paying a cover charge slows things down - but the entry flow is super-light at three in the morning.

Two middle-aged white guys sit on stools at the end of the barricades, on dress-code enforcement detail, arguing with a dazzling young urbanite.

"I told you to take off that long white undershirt," one of the enforcers is telling him. "And you went around the corner and tucked the shirt into your pants. I can still see the shirt. You're not gettin' in."

"Shit!" The urbanite turns and heads back around the building.

"I got to talk to my ride! They're inside!" pleads another dude who's been kicked out of the club for whatever infraction. The enforcers summarily dismiss him, and he slinks out to loiter in the parking lot and wait for his people.

"Long night, gentlemen?" I ask the enforcers as I pass.

"Every night's a long night," one of them replies. I can see the wear in his eyes.

"How strict's the dress code here?"
"No jersies, no hats, no white T-shirts, no red, no blue, no baggy pants--"
"That's like half my wardrobe."
"No shoes without laces--"
"Shoes without laces? Is that a gang thing?"
"Apparently, yeah."
"Shit, when did it get so complicated to go out and get drunk and dance?"

Pop's is a completely different scene. Twenty, maybe thirty people in a vast bar, sitting, drinking, talking, playing pool, Sublime on the stereo at modest volume. And these people actually want to talk to me. I spend the length of a vodka/club soda bullshitting with four guys in their thirties who are out getting loaded with the work week looming before them. One of them has to be at work at seven, and his friends keep buying him Jager Bombs. Lord have mercy on his soul.

--

I find Alison, Jordan and Jill in the back right corner of The Oz, sitting at the far end of a long, boomerang-shaped vinyl booth. Alison and Jill are both sweaty, having exerted themselves on the dance floor the entire time I was at Pop's. Both of them keep telling me they love me, and I tell them the same. Alison sits on Jordan's lap, and Jill perches herself on my left knee. "I'm almost 200 pounds," she whispers in my ear, and I smell nothing but rum. "Let me know when your leg can't take it anymore."

I can feel the body heat steaming off of her, and I ask her why the fuck she's still wearing that white shawl-sweater around her neck. That was me out there dancing, I would have coat-checked the shawl or tossed it up to the stuffed-sausage posse a long time ago. She doesn't answer me. She wants a closed-mouth kiss instead. I oblige her. Then my beer runs out, my leg starts to get tired, and I tell Jill I'm getting up for another drink.

When I come back, Jill's giving Alison a lap dance, and Jordan's adopted the bodyguard stance again. I watch the proceedings, rather bemused, and not even a minute later, Jill loses her balance and tumbles into Alison's left leg and shoulder. The same leg and shoulder, mind you, that were shattered in a serious car accident two years ago and are now held together with metal rods. Alison screams, her bodyguard rushes to the rescue, and all of a sudden it's time to go.

"Quick question," I call out to a hot-ass 19-year-old in the parking lot who's leaving with her boyfriend. "Were you groped on the dance floor tonight?"

"God, that's not even the word for it," she tells me, eyes bugged out a little. "It was like an air raid."

--

Jill and I make the return trip to St. Louis County in the back seat of Alison's Trailblazer, sprawled all over each other. The best-of booty CD we were listening to on the way out here (nothing like being 27 years old and drinking rum from a water bottle and belting out the chorus to "Dazzy Duks") has been replaced with a hip-hop mix I made Alison for her birthday.

I'm dictating, Music Nazi-style, instructions on when to skip to the next track and what songs to turn up and just generally annoying the fuck out of everyone, and I'm smoking another Black and Mild Mild with the windows down. I don't know why I've been wasting my time trying to befriend strangers all night - my friends voluntarily put up with my shit on a near-full time basis. It doesn't get any better.